Concierge medicine
Concierge medicine practices charge an annual fee that can range from $1,200 to $10,000, depending on the practice.
There are several models that physicians can choose from when transitioning a practice to concierge from traditional fee-for-service.
Full Conversion
One of the main goals in moving to a concierge-style practice is to reduce a practice’s patient panel size to just 300 or 400, rather than several thousand, which is now more typically the case.
Some doctors start with a full conversion of their practice whereby they terminate all patients who choose not to participate and pay the monthly retainer fee.
“It’s a high-risk, low-reward model,” says Matt Jacobson, founder and chief executive officer of Signature MD, a national concierge medicine provider headquartered in Los
Angeles, California.
Benefits of this approach include reduced physician work hours and the ability to eliminate many of the administrative burdens that come with insurance contracts, but not much increase in income.
Immediate conversion to concierge medicine is also high risk. “What happens if you don’t get the 300 or 400 patients that you need? What if you only get 200?” Jacobson says. “You’re going bankrupt, or you’re working at the urgent care [center] or something else to supplement.”
Hybrid concierge model
In the hybrid concierge model, a physician delivers differing levels of care to two distinct patient groups–those who pay the concierge fee and those who don’t.
“If you pay me $2,000, you’ll have my cell phone number, and you’ll get to the front of the line at the office. If you don’t pay me $2,000 it’s business as usual,” Jacobson says.
Although doctors operating under this model can see a small increase in their income, they increase their clinical hours, Jacobson says.
In addition, there are ethical issues inherent in a two-tiered practice in which some patients pay for a higher level service than others. For example: does the physician spend 30 minutes with a healthy patient who has chosen the concierge model and only a fraction of that time with a patient facing myriad health issues who has chosen not to pay the annual fee?
Market segmentation
Jacobson describes a third model of concierge medicine–a market segmented approach–that he says was developed by SignatureMD. “It’s a high-reward, low-risk model,” he says.
Similar to other approaches, physicians seek to convert roughly 300 patients. The practice then brings on either a junior physician or nurse practitioner. Patients who participate in the concierge model will continue to see their doctor. Those not participating will see the new physician and/or nurse practitioner.
With this approach, Jacobson says, it’s feasible for physicians to more than double their income while reducing their workload by 25%.
According to Garrison Bliss, MD, president of Qliance Medical Group and founder of the second monthly fee practice in the United States, concierge medicine offers physicians many benefits. However, he cautions against a major trap of the model.
“In the concierge world, there’s this fear that if you didn’t do a bunch of exotic testing, and you didn’t have a cool new medicine that you knew about that other people didn’t know about, that it would be hard for people to believe they were getting better care from you,” Bliss says.
